You are not allowed to reverse engineer Windows files by disassembling or decompiling them

You are not allowed to analyze Windows files with the trace functions of Wine

People who work or have worked for Microsoft should probably not participate

Other Outreach Programs

In addition to Google Summer of Code Wine also participates in:

Outreachy is a program similar to GSoC organized by the Software Freedom Conservancy. The goal of Outreachy is to provide encouragement, experience, and networking opportunities for minorities that are underrepresented in tech. Unlike GSoC, it is not limited to students; you can read the Wine Wiki's Outreachy page for more information.

Google Code-In is aimed at pre-university students and doesn't require any previous coding experience. As a result, the tasks for Code-In participants are more focused, smaller, and have a gentler learning curve. Some aren't even programming tasks but related to other aspects of an open-source project, such as market research, user-support, or documentation. For more details, see the Wine Wiki's Code-In page.

Ideas

Your own idea

Possible mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

If you have an idea, please post it on Wine Developers mailing list so we can help you with your idea and find out if it's realistic or not. Showing initiative and willing to discuss your idea greatly improves your chances of getting accepted. Even more so than taking one of the ideas below.

As long as you work hard and interact with the community and your mentor in a positive and constructive way you don't have to worry about not meeting all your goals.

Direct3D - Automated game benchmarks

Monitoring performance over time is a tedious task. In many cases it requires manual gameplay, and the results are unreliable if the gameplay is not 100% the same every time. It would be much better if the game could be scripted to produce a reliable result without human intervention.

Many games have a replay mode or even a builtin benchmark mode for this purpose. Stefan Dösinger has written a few scripts for Half Life 2, Unreal Tournament, Trackmania and a few other games to monitor performance. More tests are needed, especially with newer games.

If you know some games that offer a benchmark mode that can be controlled from the command line or via Autohotkey this task may be right for you. The goal is to write scripts that can run the games on Windows (and thus by extension in Wine), configure common settings, run a benchmark and read the result. Stefan's scripts track the results via the Phoronix Test Suite, but other performance monitoring tools can be used as well.

Direct3D 10 Effects

Possible Mentors: Józef Kucia

Difficulty: Medium

Direct3D 10 implements effects in d3d10.dll. Native d3d10.dll cannot be used in Wine; thus, it would be quite valuable to have a better support for Direct3D 10 effects.

The work would consists of writing more tests for Direct3D 10 effects and implementing missing functionality.

The project goal could be set to fix/improve Steam Big Picture rendering in Wine, see bug 44120.

Direct3D - Microbenchmarks

Debugging performance problems in full games is a challenge. Small test programs that test the performance of single operations can help to locate performance problems and fix them. Once fixed, those test programs can be used as regression tests to detect regressions that are hidden inside the margin of error in games. With an equivalent test case in OpenGL it is possible to separate problems in wined3d from problems in the driver.

Stefan Dösinger has already written test programs for draws, buffer uploads, clears and a few other operations and is testing them on a daily basis. More tests need to be written. The test programs will probably be maintained outside the Wine source tree.

A good application should contain a list of d3d operations to test, a rationale why those operations are good candidates and a short description how each of the tests will be implemented.

Make explorer.exe more useful

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

Knowledge prerequisite: C, Win32

Difficulty: Medium

Wine's file explorer allows a user to browse files but many features are missing. In particular, there is no support for drag & drop copying and moving of files and directories.

On many platforms, using a native file browser is a more natural alternative. However, on Android (and Chrome OS) machines, improving Wine's file browser could be better than using a native file browser. This is because of the Android security model and file system structure. Wine, when installed on Android, lives in a sandbox running as its own user, and on a non-rooted device, a native file browser will not have access to the files inside the Wine prefix. A user who wants to copy files from the limited areas of shared storage (i.e., the Downloads folder) into the c: drive, or vice versa, basically has to use a wine command prompt. Adding move / copy features to Wine's file explorer would provide a more user-friendly mechanism (which could also be used on other Wine platforms if desired).

Not being able to interact easily with the wineprefix is a major and basic usability issue with Wine on Android and Chrome OS. You can fix it!

The most notable missing features are geometry and texture handling, state management and actual 3D draws.

Applicants should have understanding of how 3D APIs work, and specific knowledge in old Direct3D / DirectDraw versions will be of an advantage. You will have to work with file formats for 3D geometry and textures, fixed function transformation and the really awful Direct3D 1 interface.

VKD3D/Direct3D 10 - shader reflection

Possible Mentors: Józef Kucia

Difficulty: Medium - Hard

VKD3D contains libvkd3d-shader library which has a parser for shaders in the DXBC format.

The goal of project would be to introduce shader reflection API to libvkd3d-shader. In the long-term, the API could be used to implement Direct3D 10 shader reflection - ID3D10ShaderReflection.

The work would consists of writing tests for ID3D10ShaderReflection, writing code for parsing DXBC chunks, and developing a new libvkd3d-shader reflection API.

The project would choose a reasonable subset of the missing functions and the work would consist of writing behavioral tests for those functions and actually implementing the functions themselves. We will help you in selecting a reasonably-sized subset of the API, suitable for a GSoC project.

Tools - Winetest Scripting Interface

Wine has an extensive set of regression tests. These tests can be helpful for projects Wine depends on. E.g. the developers of 3D drivers may want to run our d3d tests and our d3d implementation to test their OpenGL implementations.

One obstacle Mesa developers reported is that the default way to run tests (run "make test") only reports success or failure. That's OK when all tests are passing, but it is a problem when there are known test failures and you want to make sure you don't introduce additional failures. In this case users have to manually check the output written to stdout, which is a terrible task.

The Wine testbot has some scripts to ignore known failures. It might help developers of dependency libraries if we made them available outside the testbot environment somehow. On the other hand we do not want to make the existing test code more complicated than it is. Ideally the tests themselves would not be modified.

For your proposal please think about what the API of such a scripting interface would look like and which information it provides to its callers.

DirectWrite: Implement vertical text layout support

DirectWrite is a text layout and rendering library available on recent Windows releases, starting with Vista. It provides several API layers to manage font file, process text, render it, and interact with GDI subsystem. A lot of basic functionality is already supported in Wine, this proposal is however about specific feature to process and render text in vertical mode. This touches every layer mentioned above, brief summary on what needs to be done follows:

AnalyzeVerticalGlyphOrientation - this method analyzes input text and returns orientation for every part of the text;

vertical glyph metrics should be properly returned, that includes GetDesignGlyphAdvances;

layout part has to support vertical direction when building lines, this implies baseline calculation, alignment logic changes, maybe something else;

IDWriteBitmapRenderTarget1 and IDWriteGlyphRunAnalysis have to support sideways mode too.

crypt32: Implement DSS (digital signature standard) Provider

Possible mentors: Hans Leidekker

Knowledge prerequisite: C

Difficulty: Medium

Many .NET applications fail to run, because currently the DSS and enhanced DSS provider are missing in crypt32.dll.
There are already some tests for that, but more might be necessary. See also Bug 10506

AppDB improvements

Possible mentors: Jeremy Newman, Rosanne DiMesio

Knowledge prerequisite: PHP, HTML, MySQL

Wine's Application Database (https://appdb.winehq.org/) is old and could use improvements. If you have ideas for improvements and new features please step forward!

Uniscribe is the text layout and rendering system for earlier versions of windows and much of the Wine UI. The frameworks is mostly in place as well as a first pass implementation for many languages including the Indic languages. However nobody with more than a passing knowledge of the languages has dug into the details and issues in properly displaying these complicated languages. Including issues around separate Indic matras. Ideally the student working on this will also be fluent enough to at least start doing some translation of the Wine strings into the target language as well, so that Wine's usability in those languages greatly improves.

Implement Windows Media Player control

Possible mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

Knowledge prerequisite: C, COM+, OLE32, DirectShow?

Difficulty: Medium

A lot of apps and libraries use Windows Media Player COM/ActiveX control to implement media playback (Including MS .Net's System.Windows.Media.MediaPlayer class).
Users can usually workaround this by just installing windows media player 9 or 10. However this technically requires a Windows license.
Wine currently has a stub-only implementation of WMP.
WMP can be used in a headless mode for media playback or could be used as a full UI component with full controls. For the purpose of GSoC scope could be limited to headless parts.

It would be nice to have a builtin implementation. Potentially media playback could be implemented using DirectShow.

This project should most likely have an end goal of "Have <insert app/game here> work with builtin WMP implementation and have audio/video media playback working".

Winecfg / winemenubuilder - enhance MIME type handling

Wine tries to integrate Windows programs as much as possible into your unix/linux system and provides ways to directly assign MIME types to programs running in Wine. This makes it possible to open Word when you click on a .docx file in your file browser. However, this kind of integration is not always desirable, especially if there are native programs which support the same MIME type. At the moment a user can only decide to disable this kind of integration completely or Wine will automatically forward all MIME type registrations of Windows programs, resulting in questionable ones like .txt -> notepad and .png -> Wine Internet Explorer. If a user wants to remove such MIME type registration again, it is necessary to manually delete the according files.

The idea of this task is to provide a GUI (most probably as part of winecfg) to control the creation of such MIME type assignments and therefore making Wine more user friendly. You can find ideas how such a GUI could look like in the Forum or in the Bug Tracker. This task is also suitable for new Wine developers as no deep knowledge about the Wine source code is required. It might help though to have some knowledge about Win32 Dialogs.

Tools - Winetest Graphical User Interface

Currently the only way to see test results in a nice synthetic format is to upload the report and view it at test.winehq.org.

It would be nice to have a mode in winetest.exe that would present a nice table of available tests with their results, ideally updated on the fly as tests are run.

The list could also be interactive and allow you to click on a test to run it again, view its result log, etc.

CMD - implement more robust parser

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

Knowledge prerequisite: C, bison, flex, CMD commands

Difficulty: Medium

http://kegel.com/wine/sweng/2010/ is a project to fix a number of small bugs in Wine's cmd.exe and friends, and to write testcases for it. It has helped bring to light certain flaws in cmd.exe's parsing of if/then/else and () blocks.

Somebody could quite usefully spend a summer bulking up the test cases for cmd and friends, fixing any remaining reported bugs, and improving the parser.